First Family

“She’s Been Branding Since Birth”: As the West Wing Is Engulfed in Chaos, Ivanka Trump Brings Her Talents to Hyderabad

The president’s daughter is continuing to expand her portfolio, perhaps with an eye to an eventual private sector return. Sources close to the family think she and Kushner will be back in New York by June.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Ivanka Trump arrive at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad, India on November 28, 2017.

By Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images.

Earlier this week, Ivanka Trump flew commercial to Hyderabad, India, the tech hub dubbed “Cyberabad,” where the United States and India are co-hosting the 8th annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Trump’s father and boss, Donald J. Trump, has appeared to delight in the great lengths taken by his host countries to ensure his own happiness as a traveling foreign leader. In Saudi Arabia, a five-story image of his face was projected onto his hotel; in Japan, he was treated to a round of golf and served a well-done hamburger. Similarly, before Ivanka’s visit, droves of workers filled potholes along the major roads, swept away trash, and cleared streets of beggars and stray dogs. They strung lights on bridges, positioned black-and-white swan sculptures along roadways, and painted tree trunks with rainbows and little pink ladybugs. Billboards with Ivanka Trump’s smiling face beside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sprung up across the city.

The cleanup came in advance of what the Indian media has called “a royal visit” by Ivanka, whom Modi invited during his trip to the White House in June. Ivanka is leading the U.S. contingent, a departure from years past when top-level U.S. envoys, including secretaries of state and President Barack Obama, attended. (Last week, CNN reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who just returned from a lengthy trip abroad of his own, was not attending, nor would he send senior State Department officials. Sources told the outlet that this was a deliberate snub.) This year’s theme, “Women First, Prosperity For All,” falls in line with the agenda the First Daughter chose for herself when she decided to move to Washington, and which she advocated for during recent visits in Japan and Germany. These previous visits, at the invitation of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and the request of Chancellor Angela Merkel, respectively, appeared to be flattering acknowledgements of the unusual role Ivanka is playing in the White House (in Germany, one panel moderator confessed that Germans knew of no such role) and perhaps attempts at trying to make sense of the loutish enigma occupying the Oval Office.

Wearing a $3,550 jacquard-green A-line Erdem dress adorned with pink and gold flowers and a keyhole at the décolletage, Ivanka addressed the crowd of 1,200 entrepreneurs, half of whom are women, in the opening keynote speech. “As a former entrepreneur, employer, and executive in a male-dominated industry, I have seen firsthand that all too often, women must do more than their male counterparts to prove themselves at work, while also disproportionately caring for their families at home,” she said. “After my father’s election, I saw an opportunity to leave my businesses for the privilege of serving our country and empowering all Americans—including women—to succeed.“ She went on to detail the roadblocks women around the world run into, and what she says the Trump administration has done to surmount them, including helping found a World Bank initiative that gives women in developing countries access to capital-reducing regulation, expanding apprenticeship programs and prioritizing STEM education, and working to pass tax reform—all of which Ivanka has been involved with in her short Washington tenure. These, she said, are “policies that lift government barriers and fuel entrepreneurship so that Americans can turn their dreams into their incredible legacies.”

Ivanka, as she noted, is an entrepreneur moonlighting in D.C. after a unique opportunity opened itself to her. In building her Washington legacy, not everything has gone as planned, of course. During her year in the West Wing, she has been blamed for both not intervening to stop some of her father’s more incendiary positions and unduly exerting too much influence. (A Saturday Night Live sketch earlier this year featured her, played by Scarlett Johansson, marketing a faux perfume cuttingly named “Complicit.”) Some of the acquaintances she once socialized with in New York have turned their back on her. Her husband, Jared Kushner, is staring down the barrel of multiple investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And her father hasn’t made her job easier, reportedly expressing private frustration with Ivanka after she sided with the alleged victims of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, whom Trump has endorsed.

All this has played out against a dizzying backdrop of seemingly existential threats: North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship; Robert Mueller’s escalating probe of Trump associates (including her husband); a wave of geopolitical intrigues across the Middle East and a looming government shutdown in Washington. But as usual, the First Daughter has compartmentalized, at least publicly, focusing on the niche she has carved out for herself. Upon her return from India, she will continue to push for tax-reform legislation, which advanced in the Senate on Tuesday. She expects to host more dinners with lawmakers at her Kalorama home, as she has done over the last several months, and continue addressing issues impacting women and families. There’s more, of course. Two people have also noted that after-school sports have also come up as an issue. According to a source familiar with the situation, since the transition, she has been in several meetings about the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a topic that has come up organically in broader conversation about supporting the games, this person said.

This unusual portfolio does not appear accidental. Before she took her White House gig, Ivanka built an eponymous lifestyle brand that catered to women who worked, offering them office-appropriate clothes and shoes and bags and jewelry; writing them books about how to get ahead and then balance it all; and hiring a team to post tips and advice that ultimately connected these buyers back to her persona and the goods she could sell them. “She’s been branding since birth. You think she’s going to stop now that she has the ultimate platform?” one person close to the family told me.

Ivanka Trump appears to recognize, too, that she won’t be in Washington forever. The ongoing, ever-shifting parlor game about when the couple will return to New York now has them staying in Washington through the end of the school year—in June, according to four people in their social orbit—although plans can shift and nothing is set in stone. (Kushner himself told The Washington Post earlier this month that they’re that they’re there to stay, and this his wife recently asked if they should be looking at houses.) That Ivanka is thinking about how all of this can translate into a post-White House life, to people who know her, is unsurprising. “Everything to Ivanka is a business transaction,” one person who has known her since childhood recently told me. “She’s Donald.” The person joked that she would hand him up to Mueller if it meant she could be president.